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Mission

The mission of the Center for Disease and Vector Research is to develop and implement technologies that will alleviate the medical and economic burden exacted by infectious diseases and vector-borne diseases in human and plants. The Center achieves this through cross-disciplinary research by combining expertise in molecular biology, nanotechnology, gene silencing and the genomics-based sciences with expertise in insect pest control. Our goal is to provide practical solutions within therapeutic and economic time frames.

Our laboratory studies the composition and architecture of circadian networks in plants and animals. These networks are thought to provide adaptive advantages to organisms, and are now known to be pervasive in their integration with many other regulatory modules in multiple cell types. We employ high throughput genomic and chemical biology pipelines to identify network components and apply mechanistic approaches to understand their detailed function and interactions. In both plant and animal systems we have found that circadian networks are hierarchical and composed of regulatory layers that act at the transcriptional and posttranscriptional levels. Increasingly we are finding that circadian regulation is tightly integrated with metabolic networks, and operate with reciprocal regulatory interactions.

Recent results are leading us to understand how clocks regulate processes such as glucose homeostasis in mammals and growth in plants. Our data reveals the identification of the first proof of concept chemical probes for the manipulation of circadian clocks by small molecules. Target deconvolution of these chemical probes is revealing novel features of clock function. As we continue computational approaches to mine existing data collections for comprehensive network reconstruction, more is understood how such approaches present circadian clocks as highly interesting targets for development of novel therapeutics and agricultural biotechnology products.